Have you ever found yourself anxious or frustrated over some online content while scrolling down on your phone? It is called "rage bait", which is now the official Oxford Word of the Year for 2025.
Oxford University Press has named "rage bait" as its 2025 Word of the Year, highlighting a sharp surge in the phrase’s usage and visibility. The winning term topped a shortlist that also featured aura farming and biohack, with over 30,000 public votes cast during a three-day poll.
Oxford’s language experts made the final selection by assessing public sentiment, voting patterns, and linguistic data.
Oxford defines rage bait as "online content deliberately designed to elicit anger or outrage by being frustrating, provocative, or offensive, typically posted to increase traffic or engagement".
According to researchers, its use has tripled in the past year, reflecting a shift in how people discuss attention, online ethics, and digital behaviour.
The term first appeared in 2002 on Usenet, where it described the irritation triggered by a motorist flashing their lights to overtake. It later evolved into internet slang referencing viral posts, often used critically to describe the broader systems that shape what appears online.
Today, rage bait is widely used in newsrooms and by content creators as shorthand for deliberately divisive material designed to provoke anger, often to boost engagement.
Oxford notes that the phenomenon has also fed into practices such as rage farming, where creators repeatedly seed provocative content, sometimes misinformation or conspiracy-driven material, to build outrage over time.
Although made up of two separate words, Oxford considers rage bait a single lexical unit. The expression combines rage, meaning a violent outburst of anger, and bait, originally referring to a tempting morsel.
Oxford’s experts say its rise underscores English's flexibility in forming new compounds that capture contemporary realities.
President of Oxford Languages Casper Grathwohl said the prominence of the term highlights growing public awareness of online manipulation.
"The internet has shifted from capturing our curiosity to hijacking our emotions," he said, adding that rage bait reflects "the extremes of online culture" at a time when technology increasingly shapes human identity and behaviour.
